Stay Tuned #49: Another Midnight Run

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

Back when all TV aired live or pre-scheduled (and on television), there were things called blocks, kind of like breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus for your eyeballs. People of my generation most likely remember things like TGIF, Must-See TV, Saturday morning cartoons, the Disney Afternoon, Toonami, and Adult Swim, most of which were collections of family- or child-oriented programming that aired on major networks at mainstream viewing times. But cable networks had their blocks, too, with big-budget-for-TV, mid-afternoon or weekend programming aimed typically at a teenage or young adult male demographic, which is why you had stuff like Hercules and Xena, Black Scorpion, Mutant X, Beastmaster, Jack Of All Trades, and Mortal Kombat Conquest airing at these times. Some of these properties even did well enough at the time (or just needed a feature-length pilot episode to get them off the ground) to get movie adaptations. This is where the Action Pack (which aired on WGN and KTLA when I was a little bitty boy growing up in California in the 90s) comes in, and how a then-six-year-old, unfunny, formulaic "action" "comedy" wound up with three sequels...that are more like spinoffs or reboots.

Please make Just the Ticket part of your midnight run by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, post your plot-requisite but questionably sourced dating advice in the comments section at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read to help get my feature-length pilot episode off the ground, and follow me from coast to coast on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

The Midnight Run Action Pack hit small screens in 1994 with Another Midnight Run, directed by James Frawley (who looks like an evil Mr. Bean and has a who's-who of TV and film credits to his name stretching back to the 60s, including The Muppet Movie, Columbo, and The Monkees TV show). As this is a made-for-TV movie, original actors like DeNiro, Grodin, Joey Pants, and Farina were too expensive to cast. Here, Jack Walsh is played by Christopher McDonald (two years away from eating pieces of shit for breakfast in Happy Gilmore), Alien Resurrection's Dan Hedaya replaces Pantoliano as Walsh's boss, Eddie, Ed O'Ross (Dick Tracy) as a much less face-punched Marvin Dorfler, and most notably for reasons I'll get into shortly, frequent Star Trek guest star John Fleck as Eddie's receptionist sidekick, Jerry.

The fact that Jerry is still employed (and that Jack is still a bounty hunter) means that Another Midnight Run is more of a prequel or a reboot than a direct sequel to the big screen original. Jack was pretty much set to retire with the Duke's money at the end of that one, and had something of an amiable relationship with his ex and daughter, and I'm pretty sure Jerry was outed as a rat for Serrano and his goons. So, yeah; brand new story.

As such, we spend entirely too much time at the beginning of the movie on re-establishing Jack Walsh as a scumbag with a heart of gold, and because Another Midnight Run is a TV movie (read: a drawn out TV episode with a budget), he has dating skills so bad that I could give him pointers. Enter Arrested Development's Jeffrey Tambor and Raging Bull's Cathy Moriarty as the bail-jumpers whom Walsh and Dorfler will be fighting over throughout the next hour-thirty-two. Because Walsh needs dating advice (and the movie will need a contrived reason to make him uncharacteristically stupid so the plot can repeat itself later), they play a dysfunctional con-artist couple who work well together but often bicker and resort to domestic violence against each other (because punching a woman in the head was...funny...in the mid-90s?). Also important to the narrative that matters is Sam Shamshak (who sells Shikakan seashells by the seashore of Shawshank that he shipped from Chicago) as their secretly homicidal partner in crime, Lester Weems. The usual Midnight Run antics proceed on a lather, rinse, repeat basis: Walsh gets his catch, they outsmart him, Dorfler gets them, they annoy him, Walsh gets them back, they outsmart him,..., until the "real bad guy" gets caught, Walsh learns a lesson and has a change of heart, and the credits roll with him getting a date. This clearly could have been shortened down to an hour-long episode with commercials by cutting out some of the less important mechanical repetitions, the absence of swearing was glaringly apparent despite it feeling excessive in the original, which watered down the characters as we got to know them there, and the unsavory artifacts of the time and the formulaic plot didn't help matters. What did improve this over the original for me was how much more charismatic the characters were, how much funnier the dialogue was, and how on point the chemistry between the main cast was. Sure, it took awhile to get going, and seeing the same beats repeat themselves (aided by contrived stupidity) wore on me near the end, but unlike the original, Another Midnight Run got some genuine laughs out of me. Hopefully, the sequels keep this upward trend going.

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Please continue to make Just the Ticket part of your midnight run by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, post your plot-requisite but questionably sourced dating advice in the comments section at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read to help get my feature-length pilot episode off the ground, and follow me from coast to coast on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Bailing Out